Dressing – 1880s Melbourne

An English observer, Richard Twopeny, writes about female dress in 1880s Melbourne:

I fancy that the French modistes manufacture a certain style of attire for the Australian market. It is a compound of the cocotte and the American. Nor when she has got a handsome dress does the Melbourne grande dame know how to wear it; she merely succeeds in looking like what a Brighton lodging-house keeper once defined to me as a “carriage lady”.